Percussion delivered the Development Plan for deploying Rhythmyx CMS this week right on schedule. Their technical team has moved on to "foundation work" that will continue through next week. Foundation work includes building our defined content types, setting up communities and roles, creating templates, and transitioning our layouts and style sheets to Rhythmyx.
Percussion consultants then will return to Blacksburg the week of Sept. 10 to install everything locally. They will work side-by-side with our CMS administrators and developers to assist with implentation, provide mentoring, and ultimately complete a "hand off" of the CMS to Virginia Tech by week's end.
The fun begins after that. We'll spend following weeks doing further implementation work, testing, tweaking, testing -- you get the idea -- with a goal of using Rhythmyx to maintain http://www.vt.edu in production by Nov. 1 at the latest. We'll also begin intensive work on a CMS Migration Guide that will be a "how to" manual for transitioning department websites to Rhythmyx CMS, and we'll develop training courses -- including an orientation class -- that will be offered through the Faculty Development Institute beginning later this fall.
There is SO much more to share about Rhythmyx CMS to orientate the university community to its features, its functionality, and the many benefits it offers. As we become more intimately familiar with the system, I'll provide some educational blog entries to help you all learn more about Rhythmyx and begin to understand how you can use it to maintain your own websites.